Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Inequality For All (Film)

Last
week I went to see a film,Inequality for All.The stars of the film, made by Jacob Kornbluth,
are members of the American working class—people who do everything they’re
“supposed” to and continue to struggle at a time when the wealthiest members of
our society are growing richer and seeking to shed their obligations towards
our community.

The
film has been likened to Al Gore’s An
Inconvenient Truth, and indeed, the truths Reich presents—in a film which
is no less engaging for the well-designed graphs and charts which help him to
make his point—are inconvenient for both those who are actively sabotaging the
welfare of our nation and those who would rather just sit back and ignore our
problems.

Reich
documents how what he calls the “Great Prosperity”—the years between the
late-1940s and the mid-1970s (an
era which he explains in this post)—was created not only by government
insistence on the wealthy giving back to the society which empowered them, but
by a strong and pro-active workforce.It
is a lesson in economic history which jars many of the assumptions we hold
about the U.S. economy.

I
watched Inequality For All at the
California Theater, and Reich and Kornbluth arrived for a Q&A session at
the end of the film.The audience was
voluble as Reich and the film’s stars laid out the extent of inequality in the
U.S. today, booing and hissing at the greed of plutocrats, the subservience of
presidents past, and the spinelessness of the current occupant of the Oval
Office.The Q&A ended with a Tea
Party plant asking about the “Muslim” in the White House, and while for a
moment it looked as though the smirking questioner might be shouted down, Reich
intervened and after hearing the question out, drew a parallel to the 1930s,
when the world was beset by similar levels of inequality, and when demagogues
around the world sought to make scapegoats of members of the community in lieu
of addressing economic inequality, but when ultimately, in the United States,
the public and their representatives decided that such inequality was
intolerable, and did something about it.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.